Hiraeth — a beautiful Welsh word for a profound, nostalgic yearning for a lost time, era, or home to which you can never return.
I’ve spent years on social media. Years loving technology, cycling through phones and smartphones, years with email, years on YouTube — learning and numbing. That last word matters more than the first.
But now that I’ve stripped my phone of every social media app — along with the other apps I was using to distract my own thoughts (stocks, banking, notes, and more) — I can say this clearly, for myself and my mental health:
Social media is not okay anymore.
Algorithms exist to keep you in a lane you were never meant to be in. They create automatic division between people who weren’t meant to be divided. We seem to have lost what it means to be human — and we’re standing back watching it happen, convincing ourselves it’s fine.
We already had politics and religion to stoke conflict. But social media escalated that division at a scale we’ve never seen before. And we scroll through it like it’s normal.
If it weren’t for one brand I still manage social for, I think I’d be fully out. Here’s what’s wild: my website drives better numbers on its own than any link from my social pages ever has. Yet there’s still this pull — the idea that sharing thoughts around mental health might actually help someone out there.
Is that true though? Because honestly? I don’t like it here anymore.
These days I carry a book. When thoughts show up, I write them down and sit with them. Some get solved today. Some take months. But I’m not feeding them to an algorithm that’s going to monetize and weaponize the things I’m actually thinking.
I miss riding my bike around town with nowhere to be. I miss hanging with friends over nachos and drinks — no phones, no documentation, just actual life happening in real time. I think we need to find our way back to that.
Ya feel me?
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